Apart from the fact that this title has a stupid title: Beyond Cyberpunk: New Critical Perspectives (Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature) looks like it might be an interesting read.
Personally I cannot stand the use of the word 'beyond' - it reeks of gheyness and/or pseudo intellectualism - kind of like 'after theory' or 'post-postmodernism'.
There is nothing wrong with Cyberpunk, theory or postmodernism and I suspect those that think we are 'beyond' or 'after' them haven't really quite grasped what they are and are just trying to look cool. It comes accross as a bit dismissive and ignorant to me. It is OK to be avant-garde and at the forefront but to think you are somehow beyond everyone else is slightly immature.
Oddly (or not as the case may be) the following description of the text in question seems to fly in the face of acclaimed 'beyondness':
"In this collection of essays, contributors consider the continuing cultural relevance of the cyberpunk genre into the new millennium. Cyberpunk is no longer an emergent phenomenon, but in our digital age of CGI-driven entertainment, the information economy, and globalized capital, we have never more been in need of a fiction capable of engaging with a world shaped by information technology. Contributors seek to move beyond the narrow strictures of cyberpunk as defined in the Eighties and contribute to an ongoing discussion of how to negotiate exchanges among information technologies, global capitalism, and human social existence. Essays offer a variety of perspectives on cyberpunk’s diversity and how this sub-genre remains relevant amidst its transformation from a print fiction genre into a more generalized set of cultural practices, tackling the question of what it is that cyberpunk narratives continue to offer us in those intersections of literary, cultural, theoretical, academic, and technocultural environments"
Words like 'continuing', 'relevance', 'engaging', 'ongoing', 'variety', and 'continue' are all clearly at odds with 'beyond'.
Perhaps they meant OUTSIDE which wouldn't work either as all the world is Cyberpunk.
Some words to consider: delineation, demarcation, disambiguation, precision, and CREDIBILITY.
Wednesday, 1 August 2012
Tuesday, 31 July 2012
Obama will control the internet, signs Emergency Internet Control
Barack Obama has signed an executive order that could hand control of the internet to the U.S. Government, in the event of a natural disaster or terrorist attack. "The federal government must have the ability to communicate at all times and under all circumstances to carry out its most critical and time sensitive missions," Obama said.
President Obama adds that it is necessary for the government to be able to reach anyone in the country during situations it considers critical, writing, “Such communications must be possible under all circumstances to ensure national security, effectively manage emergencies and improve national resilience.” Later the president explains that such could be done by establishing a “joint industry-Government center that is capable of assisting in the initiation, coordination, restoration and reconstitution of NS/EP [national security and emergency preparedness] communications services or facilities under all conditions of emerging threats, crisis or emergency.”
But Section 5.2 has raised alarm among those who fear the government will have too much control over the Web. The section explained how the secretary of homeland security - currently Janet Napolitano - will 'satisfy priority communications requirements through the use of commercial, Government, and privately owned communications resources, when appropriate.'
White House officials have acted quickly to ease concern, insisting the order is just an update of an existing authority dating back to 1984 . The claim the government has been granted no extra powers.
Kryptocyphe_9 is currently reading
Kryptocyphe_9
Adorno, Althusser, Assange, Bakhtin, Barthes, Baudrillard, Butler, Benjamin, Blanchot, Bloom, de Beauvoir, Deleuze, de Man, Chomsky, Darwin, Derrida, Durkheim, Eagleton, Eco, Engels, Feyerabend, Foucault, Freud, Guattari, Habermas, Heidegger, Horkheimer, Hutcheon, Jakobson, Kierkegaard, Kristeva, Jameson, Kuhn, Lacan, Levi-Strauss, Lukacs, Lyotard, Macherey, Marx, McHale, Nietzsche, Plato, Rorty, Said, Sartre, Saussure, Schopenhauer, Turing, Weber, Williams, Wittgenstein, Zizek.
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Zizek
Zizek
Žižek follows Louis Althusser in jettisoning the Marxist equation: "ideology equals false consciousness." Ideology, to all intents and purposes, is consciousness. Ideology does not "mask" the real—one cannot achieve true consciousness. This being the case, post-ideological postmodern "knowingness"—the cynicism and irony of postmodern cultural production—does not reveal the truth, the real, the hard kernel. Knowing that we are being "lied" to is hardly the stuff of revolution when ideology is not, and never has been, simply a matter of consciousness, of subject positions, but is the very stuff of everyday praxis itself. The cynics and ironists, not to mention the deconstructionists et al., may know that reality is an "ideological construction"—some have even read their Lacan and Derrida—but in their daily practice, caught up in an apparently unalterable world of exchange-values (capital), they do their part to sustain that construction in any case. As Marx would say, it is their very life process that is ideological, what they know, or what they think they know, being neither here nor there. The postmodern cultural artifact—the "critique," the "incredulity"—is itself merely a symptom/commodity fetish. Thus has capital commodified even the cynicism that purports to unmask its "reality," to "emancipate."
Wikipedia
Žižek follows Louis Althusser in jettisoning the Marxist equation: "ideology equals false consciousness." Ideology, to all intents and purposes, is consciousness. Ideology does not "mask" the real—one cannot achieve true consciousness. This being the case, post-ideological postmodern "knowingness"—the cynicism and irony of postmodern cultural production—does not reveal the truth, the real, the hard kernel. Knowing that we are being "lied" to is hardly the stuff of revolution when ideology is not, and never has been, simply a matter of consciousness, of subject positions, but is the very stuff of everyday praxis itself. The cynics and ironists, not to mention the deconstructionists et al., may know that reality is an "ideological construction"—some have even read their Lacan and Derrida—but in their daily practice, caught up in an apparently unalterable world of exchange-values (capital), they do their part to sustain that construction in any case. As Marx would say, it is their very life process that is ideological, what they know, or what they think they know, being neither here nor there. The postmodern cultural artifact—the "critique," the "incredulity"—is itself merely a symptom/commodity fetish. Thus has capital commodified even the cynicism that purports to unmask its "reality," to "emancipate."
Wikipedia
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